kh - diverging point
Its many months after Sora came and went, days and days of bewilderment and the sharing of theories with Hayner and Pence over the strange events that had occurred in their Twilight Town. Years after, when they sometimes-remembered-but-more-often-forgot about Sora and Kairi and Donald. When Olette found herself at a crossroads she had no idea how to approach, is when things started to change.
The summer of her fifteenth year, she’s sitting on her bed painting her toenails red. She had taken the polish from her mother’s bathroom when she found it underneath the cotton balls and the Q-tips. Olette doesn’t really know why; she’s not a nail polish kind of girl, and one day at the beach playing volleyball and scrounging for shells and sea glass would wreck the paint job completely. The night is hot and sticky and her hair is plastered to the side of her face, but she runs the brush over her smooth, clear nails and blows on them, wiggling them tentatively. And funnily enough, Olette begins to feel that having toenails the colour of Crimson Seduction wasn’t as bad as she had thought.
They peep out of her sandals, and all that day, even when hanging out in the Secret Place with Hayner and Pence, goofing off as they usually do, Olette feels as though she’s somehow carrying herself differently. She’s proud of her nails, and wants to show them off to her friends, but they’re boys; boys couldn’t possibly understand. And it’s strange, she notes later, because before she could have counted on Hayner and Pence understanding everything.
When she gets home, her mother is in her parents’ bedroom by her vanity. Olette leans up against the doorframe and watches as she takes off her wedding ring and rubs lotion on her hands in slowly, careful movements. She remembers back when she was shorter and probably cuter, when her mother would hold Olette’s head between her hands and give her a big kiss on the forehead before she went out. The scent of her hands that she left behind smelled like her sweet-smelling lotion. But now her mother barely looks up to say, “So it was you who took my nail polish.”
Olette looks down at her toes. “Yeah.”
Giving her an annoyed look, her mother turns back to the mirror and picks up a nail file disinterestedly. “Bring it back, please. And ask before you go nosing through my things.”
But when Olette returns with it, her mother is gone. The front door slams and she moves to the window, as she watches the car pull out of the driveway and speed off. Sighing, Olette places the polish on the mahogany vanity, next to the ring.
The next day, she finds out that the drug store doesn’t sell Crimson Seduction, but the clerk points her to an array of fluorescent colours in their bright packaging. It feels a little bit like a downgrade and like she wasn’t being taken very seriously, but Olette plastic bag clinks heavily as she exits the store. That night she locks the door and puts on her headphones as she paints her toenails and her fingernails with slow, methodical strokes.
And that’s how she falls asleep, and when she wakes up she’s surrounded by empty bottles, stinking of polish and her blanket ruined. But Olette feels strangely detached from her body, like she was clinging onto her soul like she holds balloons; from a string as it floated far, far away.
Summer is fleeting - soon she is entering high school, where nail polish isn’t allowed. Olette feels pale in her uniform, even though she had spent so much time in the sun. She feels wane, and flat, like her body was made of thin paper. She feels inconsequential, not enough substance to be of importance. Spinning the lock in her hands, her locker clicks open - and she sees one of those girls, the ones with long honey hair and charm bracelets talk about the upcoming party and the sandy flings she enjoyed this summer under the shadow of trees. They pay her no attention and Olette does nothing but silently let her locker click shut.
She tells Pence she’s too tired to go for a salt-sea ice cream run, even though just last week, Olette had eaten two so ravenously she let its juice drip down her chin. She doesn’t ask where Hayner is, because if he knew or could come, they’d be together. Olette feels hurt Pence accepts her excuse so quickly, but she knows that lately she’s been frightening him a little. She heard him mutter to Hayner outside their English class that he felt she was acting ‘a little nutty lately’. Hayner met her eye as she approached them and ignored Pence; she had the feeling that he understood.
Dinner is a silent affair, and Olette is so far away that one moment she’s taking her first bite of salad, and the next she’s staring at the soap suds swirl down the drain. She vaguely recalls washing the dishes with her mother; her ring is lying next to the detergent bottle. Olette picks it up, and pockets it.
She walks into the living room and sits down next to her father, possibly for the purpose of telling him about the ring and the nail polish and the whole Pence thing, but as Olette turns to talk to him, he’s hidden behind a newspaper. And just as she opens her mouth, she thinks about how long it has been since she last saw his face. And so she closes up, silently gets to her feet and goes up to her room.
Olette plays the loudest, angriest music she can find on her music player. Her face is impassive as she scratches off the clear polish she had put on. Strips of it curl off her nails. And she unscrews her mother’s bottle of red.
Her lock spins in her hands. The needle flies wildly, uncontrollably, like a compass losing its way. She clicks around with it, shuffles her papers and textbooks, banging the door close and opening it again, zipping and unzipping her backpack, sighing loudly. And as the honey-haired charm bracelet girl looks over, Olette lets her hand protrude from the extra long sleeves she wore that day. When she swings her door closed, the girl is suddenly much closer and smiling at Olette like she’s known her forever.
She invites Hayner to the party that night. Pence would not have been interested in this sort of thing. He seems adamant about things staying the same, suddenly bringing up subjects they haven’t broached in more than a year, like Sora and Donald and Goofy. He wants to blow the dust off the old theories. Relive that magical summer when they believed there was something beyond Twilight Town, where they’d be wide-eyed kids forever and all the bitter and silent parts of life didn’t exist.
But it’s not possible and Pence is starting to grate on her nerves, so she invites Hayner. It starts off pretty fun; they drive to the house it is at together, and they’re immediately assaulted by the loud bass coming from the unbelievably big sound system in the corner of the already demolished living room. They awkwardly try to dance amongst the uninhibited teens that move so fluidly around each other. They grin nervously at each other as they approach the table laden with alcohol, and take identical, brave swigs from their red plastic cups. Olette is surprised to find she kind of likes it; the numbing effect was particularly pleasant.
Soon she finds herself dancing just as easily as all of their other schoolmates, heads rocking and eyes lolling in time to the music. Liquor is passed around, and Olette - not really; more like someone other than Olette - eagerly partakes. By the time the Shiraz is drained, she’s eyeing the table, where the honey-haired girl is dancing on. It looks kind of fun, and the classmate turns around and sees her, and is about to extend a hand to help her up when Hayner appears out of nowhere and drags her off, past the pool, to the shed in the backyard.
First, she’s giddy and giggling. Then, when she’s aware of how much time must have passed since the alcohol table, she’s irritated that he had disappeared and left her all alone. Stick together always, right? Olette is just about to open her mouth to berate him - in the same tone she used to nag him about their summer assignment, when she finds herself pinned to the wall by the arms she hadn’t noticed had become strong and lean over the summer.
She doesn’t realize exactly how drunk she is until Hayner comes closer and she hasn’t moved yet. Judging by his breath, he’s had a lot to drink too. But it hadn’t brought upon him the unfeeling shell that envelopes Olette. But while she drank to erase feelings he drank to give him the strength to do something about him craving it. And that is what resulted in them entangled against the shed wall, the taste of firsts and alcohol passing between them, along with the scent of each other that they’ve recognized since childhood, but not like this; never so full and overwhelming.
She’s got her arms wrapped around his neck and his breath down her throat, and one hazy thought that comes out of all this thoughtlessness was how this would’ve been different if she had invited Pence. And from Pence she thinks to his inability to let things go and then to Sora and Donald and Goofy and to Olette - the mirror world Olette she believed to exist summers ago. Happy with her games and her friends and her fantasies.
It’s like the ticking bomb in her chest decided to explode - a tidal waves crashes upon her, leaving her disoriented and dizzy. She pushes Hayner away, the smothering smell of him, and collapses onto all fours, throwing up and crying and demanding that he take her home. But that is when the recorder clicks and she forgets. Olette faints and the last thing she sees is Sora’s crying face, the day he pulled out of the train station. Had he known it was goodbye? That he was taking away the magic - and her magic as well?
She is a social pariah the next day at school; apparently Hayner had freaked out and called the cops, which explained how Olette had woken up safely in bed to an annoyed note taped to the fridge by her parents. The classmate who had invited her to the party flips her honey hair in her face and people whisper maliciously behind her back as she walks to and from her classes. Hayner is getting quite a bit of flack as well. People jeer at him, about how much of an awful kisser he must be if his first ended up puking and passing out. Olette doesn’t exactly know how he’s dealing with it though; they’re not talking.
Her punishment is a three month grounding, but frankly the only emotion she feels from it is relief; at least she has as reason other than her leper status at school to walk home directly after last class now. Her father shook her head disappointedly at her, not bothering, or perhaps losing the tact to wonder quietly about what happened to his bright, sunny Olette. Her mother barely spares her a glance, and walks off the moment the talk is over.
Pence has taken ‘Hayner’s side’. She catches his disapproving glances from across the cafeteria, and wonders what Hayner has told him. But then she reminds herself not to care, because in Olette’s carefully composited mind, she shuffles her memories of her two best friends into the folder where she has kept the summer of the strange folk arriving at her town, on an epic search for his friend across worlds and worlds, through all kinds of evils. Once upon a time, she thinks she would have done the same for Pence and Hayner; but now, they can’t even survive the evil of high school.
One night, she loses her music player. Olette turns her room upside down looking for it, throwing her homework to the ground, sweeping all her nail polish off her bed in a frenzy. But it’s lost; and she can only cry to the sounds of her parent’s raised voices in the other room.
But that night, under a starry sky somewhere, amidst the waves of a gently rocking sea, she finds her mother’s wedding ring. She plucks it from the watery reflection, like a fallen star, and it winks and shines back at her, like it was coaxing her to smile. But it’s too late; her tears have already fallen and they run down her face and down her arm and coats her entire body... or has she fallen into the ocean? She wouldn’t be surprised; her feet are so heavy. Everything is heavy.
The surface of the water above shimmers and swirls, but her eyelids are closing as she sinks deeper.
No.
Hands. A pair of them unshackle her arms, her legs. They push her to the sparkling sky like a bird out of its cage, and its nothing but the sound of rushing water until she breaks the surface and takes her first breath in a really, really long time.
The sky is a breathy pink. There is a horizon to her back; it warms her neck and her entire body, but she’s too frightened to turn around. The waves ripple under her feet and she watches as Sora and Riku swim past her. They’re swimming to shore, and she sees Kairi in the distance, waving and calling. There is no lack of salt water in the sea as she cries at their reunion, and she sends her own silent well wishes. They extend the distance separating them, the world between them, and she so desperately wants them to turn around and grasp it, maybe pull her closer. But they don’t, because her time - no, her brief altercation with the magic is gone.
The magic was never hers. But she still had real life - she still had reality to deal with.
It was not her shore to swim to. It’s hard; it’s so hard, but with the help of whatever it was that helped her break the surface, she turns around and swims towards the rising sun.
Carpet scratches her cheek when she wakes up. It’s imprinted on her cheek like a slap, but healing - the pain is going away. Her mind is fuzzy and her knees are wobbly and when she checks the clock it’s midnight, but her soul is no longer on a balloon a string’s length away. It feel very much in her chest. She feel very much here. Like the wedding band clutched in her hand.
It grounds her, and she keeps holding onto it tightly as promises herself tomorrow; tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow she’ll apologize to Hayner and Pence and maybe the tomorrow after that they’ll be friends again. But today, there is something she must do.
The light is on. Olette knocks tentatively on her parents’ bedroom door and when there is no response, lets it creak open. Her father is gone off somewhere; her mother is sitting in front of her vanity, rubbing lotion on her hands. For the first time in a long time, Olette notices how veined her hands were, how many lines there were on her face. How tired she was. How old she was.
The ring falls onto the mahogany surface with a clatter. By the time she looks up, Olette has already turned away and is about to leave the room. But she stops, turns around slowly, and looks her straight in the eye.
“I know Mom.” She says quietly, “I know.”
And closes the door shut.